


Here, There, and Elsewhere

by DesertScribe



Category: The Retired Angel of Death - Jamie Lackey
Genre: Food, Gen, Post-Canon, Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-07-25 12:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16197965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Brittany continues her travels.





	Here, There, and Elsewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/gifts).



After they finished talking business, photography, and then a few more final bits of business, her handler asked, "So where are you going next?"

"I haven't decided yet," Brittany said. It was true that she didn't know where she was going to go. Officially, she had three more planetary visits fully booked, with another five in the planning stages while the visas and other paperwork was processed, but recent events had given her cause to distrust the people who had been helping her plan her travels, so she decided to throw out her old itinerary and start a new one from scratch. "But, wherever I end up, I'll be sure to send you pictures of it." 

"I'm looking forward to seeing them," he said, and Brittany could hear the smile in his voice.

The first thing Brittany did after ending the call to her handler was begin the search for a new travel agent. Her former travel agency had been the best at what they did. However, they had also sold her to the first person wave some credits in their direction and request a convenient, unsuspecting body, and that was not the kind of transaction which a company tended to do only once. If they had redirected Brittany at someone else's whim, then they had probably done the same to others, and chances were low that all such buyers of human flesh were as ultimately innocuous as a rich man looking to save his daughter with contraband chemicals hidden in candy flowers. Every standard year, millions of people across the galaxy traveled to new planets for what were meant to be vacations and then never returned to their planets of origin. Most of those were simply cases of travelers falling in love with their destinations and making them their new homes. Some were taking advantage of differences in planetary laws to escape debts or other problems. What outside observer would notice if a fraction of a percentage of those unexpectedly permanent relocations were not voluntary? No, that was not the kind of business practice to be tolerated, especially not when it dared to attempt to impact Company assets, retired or not, so the specialty travel agency would be getting the visit from an active asset and the cleanup team which Brittany's location had not needed.

None of that was Brittany's concern. Her handler had mentioned it as a courtesy, because he knew she would have drawn the same conclusions that he had and would be interested in the results. She expected her former employers to get the job done using any of their countless other assets who were just as well trained as she had been. He trusted her to continue enjoying her retirement, and that was exactly what she intended to do.

There had been a few destinations which Brittany had had her eye on visiting but her now former travel agency had talked her out of them in favor of her last few stops, so those became first on her list. She could have had her handler expedite matters, but she was supposed to be living something resembling an ordinary life now, so she did not ask him for the help. Besides, the delay gave her a chance to better explore the local sushi, which she had not been able to properly appreciate her first night on planet. It was too short notice to get reservations at any of the most famous locations without pulling strings, but at the moment that suited Brittany just fine. Recent events had put her in the mood to keep a lower profile for a while, and being seen visiting all the best of the best restaurants on the planet was not the way to do that. There were thousands of other restaurants to choose from which were nearly as good and not monitored half as closely by the people and artificial intelligence-directed tracking algorithms who specialized in selling gossip.

In between visiting restaurants praised for skill in one area or another, Brittany wandered cities late at night and ate greasy street food washed down by sweet tea. She visited restaurants that enthusiasts praised as hidden gems. Signage made to resemble old-fashioned neon tubing were coming back into fashion among fans of certain retro aesthetics, and by those flickering lights Brittany snapped photos of silvery fish-skin hand rolls stuffed with glistening dark red fish roe and strips of green onion cut as thin as cat whiskers while an endless stream of hover taxis sped past less than a meter away. The air displaced by the taxis buffeted the cloth of the tiny outdoor café table where Brittany sat and threatened to fling her napkin to the ground if she did not weight it down with her water glass, but she barely noticed it as she held her camera steady and, with what had become practiced ease, adjusted her f-stop to provide the exact depth of field she felt would best suit the simple presentation of the dish against the busy neighborhood background.

Before Brittany knew it, two weeks had passed since she had agreed to help the little girl. By that point, the rich man's team should have been able to isolate and synthesize all of the chemical compounds which they had extracted from her twenty pounds of fat. For all her dedicated efforts, she had only been able to replace a few scant pounds of it so far. Her enhancements made it difficult, even without the daily exercise routine, but she was dedicated in her mission and knew the rest would come back with enough time and good meals. She had not spotted the man or anyone who appeared to be watching her on his behalf in all that time. That meant either that he had succeeded in his goal and had no more need of her or that he had failed but was too afraid to ask her for further help after she had made it clear to him that she would kill him if he or anyone in his employ ever approached her without prior permission. His success or failure was not Brittany's concern, but she hoped that the little girl (Alice, one of the nurses had mentioned, whereas the man had never thought to share her name) was able to live or die on her own terms as she saw fit.

And then Brittany's time on the planet was over. The final details for the next three stops along her endless journey had been finalized, and there was nothing left to delay her. She stepped aboard the shuttlecraft which would take her off-planet. The orbital spaceport where she would transfer to the interstellar cruise liner she had booked had a bar famous for color-changing flaming drinks, and she had been too distracted to try them on her way in. Beyond that, her next destination was equally famous for its fish-based dishes, and Brittany looked forward to seeing how the two different planets' styles compared to each other.

§

More weeks passed, and then months as Brittany continued her personal tour of the galaxy. She went from planet to planet in no particular order, and time slipped by in hyperspace jumps and mouthfuls and shutter-clicks. She regained her proper shape and started feeling more comfortable in her skin again.

She bought a portable printer with full chem-fabricator capabilities, because while money was no object, time often was. Properly sized canisters of spooled antique-style photo-reactive camera film were rarely available from anyone but obscure specialty suppliers, and she was tired of having to custom order fresh batches on each planet or risk having her stock corrupted by random cosmic radiation during spaceport security checks, decontamination measures, or exposure to random cosmic radiation during travel through deep space. It was easier to make it herself, and it gave her the opportunity to play with the different varieties that had been created throughout history.

After much experimenting, Brittany decided she liked Kodachrome best for everyday use. Its performance and color balance paired well with her style. She knew that even enthusiasts complained about the more complicated processes necessary to develop it than the more common film types, but the process was still much simpler than many of the poisons she had needed to prepare fresh on site immediately before use to ensure best potency and later breakdown to render them untraceable, so Brittany had no problem with any of it.

She could have also used the printer to make new lenses for her camera from downloaded plans just like she did the film, but she held off on that for the time being. It was more fun to buy antique ones when she happened to find them for sale near wherever she landed. Macro lenses, wide angle lenses, fixed length lenses, and adjustable telephoto lenses: each of them had had their own unique strengths and drawbacks. Barrel-distortion had never been a concern when she had been looking through a rifle scope. All that had mattered back then was the clarity of the point at the center of the crosshairs. Now a less than ideal lens could give a photo which was perfectly in focus but also warped the outer edges of the composition so much that it ruined the chef's beautiful plating design decisions.

Sometimes Brittany sent her handler long complaints about the limitations of glass to accompany the photos she considered to be disappointments.

He always replied with observations of his own on the subject and more reference works on ever more specialized subjects for her to read.

She devoured the reading as she traveled the stars in search of new things to devour in a more literal sense.

§

On one planet, she nibbled from an artfully arranged charcuterie platter while drinking wine from grapes that had been grown on the slopes of a nineteen kilometer tall still active volcano. For the past three hundred years, the lava had only vented from the opposite side of the volcano from the vineyard, but that state of affairs could change at any moment. Until it did, real estate on that ashy mountainside was some of the most expensive farmland on the planet. Brittany was still teaching herself to appreciate the subtle nuances between varieties of fermented grape juice instead of the subtle nuances between varieties of weaponized sedatives or deadly poisons, but it was obvious even to her semi-trained palate that the mountain produced a terroir unlike anything she had ever had before. From what she had read, she would not find it anywhere else in the galaxy.

The restaurant was also located on the side of that same volcano, well above the elevations where grapes could thrive and as high up the cone as the local authorities allowed permanent structures to be built. The preferred local style of milkshake was far too sour for Brittany's tastes, but there were other sweets which more than made up for that deficit. The waitress who brought out the dessert cart had overly tight jaw muscles and a little bit of a twitch to one of her eyes, but that eased once it became apparent that Brittany had no intention of ordering, joking about, or even acknowledging the existence of the chocolate lava cake.

"Which is your favorite?" Brittany asked, because they all looked and smelled delicious, and there were far too many choices for her to order one of everything, at least not all at once. It would require breaking her usual rule against getting up early for any reason other than unavoidably inconvenient space flight departure times or the rare exceptional restaurant which was only open during breakfast hours, but she was seriously considering whether a return visit for their weekend brunch could be squeezed into her already heavily booked dining schedule while she was on-planet.

"I'm sure you can guess our most popular option for first-time visitors," the waitress said with a slight grimace which then became a smile when she added, "but my personal favorite is usually the ten layer mango mousse cake."

"Only usually?"

"The mango mousse cake is as excellent as always, but it's the height of peach season," the waitress said, "so I've been skipping the cake and going straight for the peach flaugnarde with pistachios and hibiscus cream." Her tone was almost conspiratorial.

"In that case," Brittany said, "I'll have an order of the peach flaugnarde and an order of the mango mousse cake."

The waitress didn't bat an eye at the double order. Instead, she smiled even wider and said, "Clearly your solution is better than mine is. I'll have to try that myself when I get off shift tonight."

Brittany grinned in return, ordered another glass of wine (her physiological enhancements scrubbed the alcohol out of her system ten times faster than a person with ordinary liver function), and sat back to wait for both the arrival of her desserts and the sunset. Her table was on the uphill end of the restaurant, which was less than ideal for photographing the best parts of the sunset itself, but after sunset she would be in the perfect position to get a few pictures of the dark tip of the volcanic cone which would be silhouetted against high clouds lit by the volcano's own perpetually spewing fire.

§

Sometimes Brittany bought new cameras. Sometimes she bought antiques which used other film formats. Sometimes she bought digital. Once she bought one with infrared and night vision capabilities, just because she could. She always read through their instruction manuals, memorizing every feature, just like she had once done when learning new weapons. Then she would go back and read through the manuals again, this time treating them as the dossiers of targets, searching for potential weaknesses to be avoided or creatively exploited.

She took interesting photographs with all of them, some of which she loved very much, but she always ended gravitating back to the camera that her handler had first given her. Maybe it was sentimentality. Maybe it was because, knowing her as well as he did, he had simply done such a good job of picking the tool which suited her best. Brittany suspected it was both.

§

In another solar system, Brittany sat in a restaurant encased in a perfectly hemispherical transparent dome at the bottom of an ocean which covered the entire mood and was in turn entirely covered by an ice sheet more than a kilometer thick. Too far from the system's sun to receive useful amounts of heat or sunlight, the only light to penetrate the depths from above came through the fiber-optic cables used to communicate with the surface. The moon's ocean only stayed liquid because of the gravitational stresses placed upon the moon by its orbital path around its planet and the additional constantly shifting gravitational pulls of the planet's twelve other moons, which kept the moon's core molten hot, which in turn powered the hydrothermal vents, which powered the ocean's ecosystem.

However, the oceans were not lightless. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nearly every sea creature native to the moon had at least some degree of bioluminescence, from the tiniest single celled bacteria and algaes to the twenty meter long marine crocodilianoids and the giant, ridiculously frilly nudibranch-like creatures larger than the average interstellar cargo ship. They all combined to produce a veritable rainbow storm of brightly colored streaks and flashes swirling around the human-built structures, and the curve of the restaurant's dome created the illusion of there being no dividing line between air and water.

In addition to being fun to watch, the crocodilianoids were also good to eat, which was the main reason why Brittany had chosen that moon as a destination. Unfortunately, while the restaurant's domed roof allowed those beneath it to pretend that the denizens of the deep might swim into their laps at any moment, it also mercilessly amplified and redirected even the tiniest sound from any part of the room to the whole rest of the room. Brittany would have gotten much more enjoyment from eating her braised crocodilianoid steak with kelp and sea-fungus if she could have done it without having to listen to nearly every single other person in the room remark to their dining companions that crocodilianoids tasted exactly like chicken.

What annoyed Brittany the most about the experience was the fact that all those people were wrong. The so-called "dinosaurs" which had been genetically engineered from birds on that one theme-park of a planet Brittany had visited early in her travels after falling for the hype that everyone needed to go there at least once in their lives, now _those_ had tasted exactly like chicken. All the chefs on the planet had done their best to hide it with capsaicins and curries and other strong spices, but the flavor of chicken underneath it all had been inescapable. In contrast, the local crocodilianoids tasted as their name implied, like crocodile and alligator and other such closely related reptiles, which might have a flavor profile superficially similar to chicken but deeper and more robust in ways that both could and could not be qualified as being gamier.

Brittany remembered her training from her old life, dredged concentration techniques she had let fall into disuse, and blocked out all extraneous distractions until the world shrank down to encompass only herself and her target, the beautiful slab of meat with its frilly kelp and fungus accompaniments with perfectly echoed the shape of a living crocodilianoid's complex fins. She dug and enjoyed.

§

And before Brittany knew it, more than a year had passed.

One day, she looked at her list of places she had visited, and then she looked at the list of places she still wanted to visit. The latter list was a surprising amount longer than the former, and by Brittany's calculations she tended to add at least three new destinations to her list of places to visit for every one that she crossed off of it and added to the list of places where she had been.

She smiled and knew that she would not want to have it any other way.

§

The call came one night just as Brittany was arriving back at her hotel room on a space station where the specialty was heavily smoked goat meat which would have been peasant food in many ancient cultures but in the station's colonial days had become a symbol of conspicuous consumption due to the resource intensive process of raising both the animals and the hardwood trees necessary to smoke their meat to an exact specification of flavor. The extra fines the rich had once been forced to pay just to compensate for the increased work the station air filters had needed to do had been exorbitant, and rightfully so. However, none of that was as important just then as Brittany's ringing phone.

"Do you remember the little girl you told me about?" her handler said. It was not really a question. "She called us today."

"So she is asking to be recruited after all?" Brittany was not sure if she was relieved or disappointed for the child. Brittany had lived a good life with her employers, but she was not sure this tiny sickly rich girl who seemed to have been grown like a delicate flower in an environmentally controlled pod would feel the same.

"Actually, no," her handler said with a laugh. "She said that she wanted to do what her father had probably never done and say, 'thank you.' She also wanted me to pass something along and get your opinion if you were willing."

"Go ahead," Brittany said, surprised by how curious she was to see exactly what the little girl could possibly want to know her thoughts on.

Her phone pinged as the data-transfer completed.

"I think she made her father tell her all about you," her handler said as Brittany scrolled through photo after photo of food on trays, first simple fare in harsh light which had no doubt been in a hospital room, and then softer, dimmer light which might have been a child's bedroom. Then, at the very end of the collection, the last few most recent photos were taken in harsh bright light again, but this time it was of sunlight on picnics in grassy meadows and on sandy beaches. "I think you have a fan, and she wants to be your friend," he added.

"I already have a friend," Brittany said and realized that she had never said as much out loud before, though she was certain her handler had felt the same for just as long as she had, if not longer.

"It wouldn't hurt to have another," he said, but his voice was more choked up than Brittany had ever heard it before.

"No, I suppose it wouldn't," Brittany said carefully. It struck her then that it had been more than a year since she had seen her handler in person. "If you aren't too busy, maybe we could meet up somewhere for dinner and we can go over these together, just like the old days."

"I'm never too busy," her handler said, and Brittany could hear the smile in his voice, "and I know of a few places I think you'd like which haven't made it onto your list yet."

"Just tell me where and when," Brittany said, grinning and already bringing up the site for the local spaceport so she could make the travel plans. "And bring your favorite camera. I know you have to have one, and I want to see it."

**The End**


End file.
